Ask ProductivityCast, 1st Edition

We get your listener messages and we love them! So, keep them coming! We try to respond to most of them via email response when we get them. For those that require more than an email, we have started to respond to them here in episodes together. And, this is the premiere edition of our Ask ProductivityCast episode series. Whenever we get a few questions that require some heavy lifting, we’ll put out an Ask ProductivityCast episode. So, keep those questions coming!
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In this Cast | Ask ProductivityCast, 1st Edition
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Francis Wade
Show Notes | Ask ProductivityCast, 1st Edition
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
Personal Kanban | ProductivityCast
Trello
ToDoist
What Is the Bullet Journal? | ProductivityCast
10 Big Ideas on Productivity from Getting Results the Agile Way
Patrick Rhone’s Dash/Plus System
GTD Connect
Episode #44: GTD for Creative People
Musician Evan Taubenfeld and entertainment lawyer Danny Passman join David Allen and Coach Kelly Forrister in an inspiring conversation about GTD for creative people. Lots of wonderful nuggets in this episode about finding the creative spark within the structure of a GTD system.
Getting Things Done (Series) | ProductivityCast (check out Episode 041, Organize)
Raw Text Transcript | Ask ProductivityCast, 1st Edition
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).


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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners to another really exciting episode. I think today we're actually going to be answering listener questions. And so we have had a few questions that come in. Typically, I actually get emailed based questions from our listeners, and I respond back. And so if you ever do send an email, I'm usually behind the helm answering those questions, and they're just usually simple ones that I can usually respond to pretty quickly and easily. But once in a while, we get some questions and we thought, well, let's actually put these together and answer them here on The podcast would help the the entire community listening. So today we've chosen three different questions that we've received over time. And we're going to answer those questions for the specific individuals, but also for you as a broader community. So let's start off with our first listener question. Our first listener question comes from Dave. So let's get into it. And so our first listener question, as I said, is from Dave, Dave says that he's a longtime GTD practitioner, he has pulled in elements of personal Kanban JD Myers getting results, the agile way. And recently, he's been using the bullet journal by Ryder Carol. And so he feels like the layers are weighing him down. And he asked some specific questions about the system. And so he wanted to go into these one by one. And so the first one, he said that he is is using a todoist for his GTD He's using Evernote for his agile results, getting results, the agile way method. And then he's using the bullet journal for his notes. So in summarizing what Dave said, he basically said that he's he's putting too many things on his Kanban boards. And he's using it primarily to track learning of songs on the guitar. And so some of the boards are going stale. And he's also testing the revival of Kanban boards at work. Oh, as he thinks that that will work better in a team collaboration environment. He's also trying to figure out the link between outcomes to GTD actions. So let's let's start off with the personal Kanban board issue. He has too many things on his boards, and he's trying to figure out what to do about that. And for those of you who are listening, we actually tackled personal Kanban in Episode 61. So if you go to ProductivityCast dotnet, forward slash 061. You can go ahead and listen to that episode on personal Kanban.
Francis Wade 2:59Do you really want to know? Well, that's bad advice though. The wrong tool. Kanban boards were mainly manufacturing me for my factoring environments where space was limited. And the number of items that you'd put on a board would be small tasks are psychological objects, and you can create an infinite number of them. And the tool doesn't scale. I think he's creating more tasks than a Kanban board is designed to handle and some people would say, oh, gosh, just cut back your tasks. But that doesn't make any sense for most people because your commitments or your commitment to they don't go away because they don't fit on a board. So instead, so just give up the idea of trying to visually manage a list of your tasks because you've outgrown it and time to move on.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:48And I will give the flips Yeah, I will give the flip side to that, which is that I think, I think, Francis you should spend more time with with Trello because you're capable of filtering to a subset of the of the things that are that are in your visual field. And you are able to create different boards for different things so that what you are visualizing as work in progress is, is limited. And there, as you said, there's no real way to say okay, well, I'll just have less tasks, there's no way for you to say, well, I'll just have less tasks. But the beauty of a digital Kanban board is that you're able to say in Trello, you're able to filter down to the, the vital few that need to be in visual field at that moment. And so you are actually able to have much more data in a Kanban Board today, because of digital tools, while still holding to the lean manufacturing processes for yesteryear.
Augusto Pinaud 4:55I agree and then I'm that he's really good that we mentioned that No, there is no way to reduce the task. But also, one of the things I see often when I work with clients is the fact that we are trying to use the wrong tool or the wrong assumption, in many cases, both to manage this growing number of tasks. And what I mean was that is, you set up the original and, you know, they've, as many others set up the original assumptions for their personal Kanban, OmniFocus doesn't matter what is the tool, and the number of tasks start growing and growing to a point where their original assumptions cannot manage any more the number of tasks. And where I see many people doing is keeping that thing that used to work those assumptions that used to work and hope that somehow that will be able to manage, the new number of tasks. And what I work with many people is getting those assumptions updated because I agree You can’t go and say, Okay, well you know, any task or any task related to this, I'm just going to scratch it, forget about it and don't do it. That will be ideal, but that doesn't happen. But what we need to do is figure it out what we need to improve in the system. Okay, and it may be the whole system, maybe a complete overhaul, but what we need to improve in the system, so we can manage the new number of tasks. You know, if you think about a vehicle, a car, if you have a small pickup truck, okay, because you have a small trailer, no problem, but as soon as you fill that trailer and then decide, okay, now I'm going to pull a bigger trailer, who your truck may require an overhaul too, your truck may require now to go to a bigger engine to to be able to hold that amount of cargo. Same thing happened with your task. You know, I see a lot of people you know, with a compact vehicle, trying to pull a trailer And saying, Well, I don't understand why my system doesn't work? Well, it's not your system that doesn't work is the assumptions where you create this system works for a really particular set of load. When you go now to the amount of task you have, your system doesn't work anymore because the assumptions are wrong. And that may require for a temporary or do more weekly reviews or simply go and change those assumptions. Understand what are those assumptions? You know, one of the things that I recommend people when they set their system is figured it out the assumptions put them on writing, because we tend to forget what we thought when we create all those contexts. You know, you come and create a context and then you forgot about it to start using them and go numb to them. You need to be able to come back and remember why'd you create them what they mean? So that way, you can see if the assumptions on the system are still valid or not.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:02And so this actually closes out my thoughts on the personal Kanban side, which is to say that projects in personal Kanban systems are for keeping the team updated. In my perspective, if you're using Kanban,...